America’s Commercial Aviation Network: Supremely Connected
A Typical Day in America’s Airspace
As a civil engineer, one of the first examples of a network that popped into my head was the air traffic produced by commercial planes. In this example, new edges are created every time an airplane departs from an airport and that edge is continuously defined by that airplane’s flight path. The nodes are the airports themselves.
The video in this post deals with the commercial airports in the United States, so the graph (all of the airports and flight paths) is connected. This means that if you were to start out at any airport in the United States, you could fly to any other airport within the United States even though it might take multiple flights. In fact, if we were to study the graph of every single airport in the United States, that graph would be connected too. As long as an airport exists, assuming its runway(s) are suitable for landings and takeoffs, an airplane can fly there, creating an edge to that airport.
The connectivity of America’s airports is showcased by the small amount of local bridges present in the graph. For instance, if I were to remove the transcontinental edge that connects LAX (Los Angeles) and JFK (New York City), I could easily still get to JFK by going through ORD (Chicago). There are an almost countless number of paths that can be used to get from one airport to another, so there are essentially no local bridges.
In all, America’s commercial aviation network is extremely dense and supremely connected because of the short lengths of all of its paths. This enables us to travel essentially anywhere we want, with at most a couple of layovers.